Neill Blomkamp Quotes

Some people make movies for money or glory and will take any subject people offer them. But I cannot do that. I need to feel the story and make it mine.

I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.

I just want to be an artist that makes exactly what he feels.

The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

It seems to me like a perversion of talent for an artist of any kind to further the corporate structure of America or the personal interests of the morons and thieves who run it.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

Some things I won't do for any amount of money. That's so demoralizing and goes against every principle that I hold. It's like, okay, some rich people can buy me because I'm a talented guy. They can buy talent. You can't buy it for yourself, but you can buy other people's talent to serve your purposes. And once an artist does that, he becomes like a plaything of the rich. You know, some of these wealthy collectors have paid lots of money for artwork that I already did, but I didn't do it with the intention of catering to them.

I'm selfish, I think. I think an artist has to be. I'm not worried about what people think. I play the parts that I find interesting. It'd bother me more to be just pigeonholed into doing what people think is ethical or that's boring to me. I don't pick parts with that in mind, I just find interesting stories. If it's interesting to me, then I do it.

The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don’t compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.

I practice the artist's golden rule. I wouldn't want somebody telling me how to finish my painting, I'm not going to tell him how to finish his movie or how to shape his movie.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

Branding is quite an important thing. As an artist, you want to be able to explore facets of yourself.

True artists scorn nothing.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.